Defund the… Trails?

As anyone who spends time riding, or god forbid working on, trail is now very familiar with, outdoor spaces have become a bit more crowded and perhaps not as rosy as they once were. Over the last fifteen years, in part due to the rapid expansion of mountain biking as a sport from counterculture to “hobby your friend’s dad participates in”, outdoor recreation visits have steadily increased on America’s public lands. Unfortunately, over the same period, funding budgets at land management agencies such as the Forest Service (USFS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that govern and provide the landscapes upon which most mountain biking occurs have decreased.

The BLM, which oversees just over 8000 miles of bike-legal trail, has seen a 25 percent reduction in appropriations for Recreation Resources Management adjusted for inflation since 2006. Over a similar time period, visits to BLM lands have increased 46 percent. In the fiscal year 2024, the BLM’s recreation management account was funded at about $53 million, a nearly $2 million decrease from fiscal year 2023.

At the Forest Service, which manages a whopping 168,000 miles of trail, funding for Recreation, Heritage, and Wilderness decreased 23 percent between 2010 and 2020, accounting for inflation, while recreational visits increased 17 percent. The Forest Service’s Recreation, Heritage and Wilderness Fund received $45 million in 2024, a $10 million decrease from fiscal year 2023.

These consistent funding shortfalls lead to public lands seeing greater maintenance issues that exacerbate trail erosion, trash, forest closures, and parking problems. In the long term, these funding shortages often create additional difficulties for volunteer groups that take on trail stewardship for public lands, to work on trail maintenance and other stewardship activities because of a lack of staffing capacity at the agencies they work with. As boring as it may seem, adequate funding, dictated by Congress, is of utmost importance for maintaining trails, campgrounds, and roads, which in turn maintain communities and the sport of mountain biking as a whole.

That sport isn’t so counterculture anymore, playing a part within the bigger tent of outdoor recreation which contributed $1.1 trillion to America’s economy in 2022, accounting for 2.2% of GDP . Investments in public lands and outdoor recreation see a huge return, whereas funding shortages lead to feedback effects that wreak havoc on recreation, environments and communities. Recreation on BLM lands contributed $11.1 billion to the economy and 73,000 jobs in 2022 while spending by visitors to national forests and grasslands contributes about $13.7 billion to the US economy and sustains about 161,000 full-and part-time jobs ( source , source ).

Investing in outdoor recreation programs at the BLM and the Forest Service will maintain this economic growth and provide a return to taxpayers. Thankfully, it isn’t up to you and I to reach into our back pockets to give the government our scrunched up beer money.

In the past decade, public lands have benefitted from historic investments, including the Great American Outdoors Act , the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act , and the Inflation Reduction Act . Acts like these come from advocacy, largely by nonprofit groups at local and national levels. Groups like Outdoor Alliance provide meaningful opportunities to both learn and engage with government actions that impact our ability to ride bikes on dirt trails on public lands. In the case of funding for recreational budgets for the BLM and USFS, that opportunity for personal advocacy is more pressing than ever, as those appropriations will be set in stone by summer's end. You can make a difference equal or greater to a day spent on the trails with shovel in hand, in just a few short minutes here .